Chapter 25 Luca
LUCA
I drop Natalia at the hospital the next morning with a kiss and a lie.
“Take your time with Anna. I’ve got an errand.”
Natalia unbuckles her seatbelt. “You’re sure you don’t mind coming back for me?”
I force my mouth into something that passes for easy. “Nat, I’m dropping you off at a hospital, not shipping you to Siberia. Text me when you’re done. I’ll come get you.”
Her brow furrows with a flicker of concern that twists in my gut. “Everything okay?”
“Yep.” It’s not even a good lie, and I see her almost question it. But she lets it go. She trusts me.
That’s the part that’s going to kill me.
“Okay.” She leans across the console, and her lips are warm and soft against mine for a second that’s both too short and too long.
I watch her slide out of the car, a flash of warm brown hair and graceful movement, before she disappears through the automatic glass doors of the hospital. My hand tightens on the steering wheel until my knuckles burn.
An errand.
That’s what we’re calling it when you go meet your uncle in an abandoned building to explain why you haven’t murdered your girlfriend yet.
Twenty minutes later, I pull into an underground garage beneath a hotel development that never broke ground. Concrete pillars. No lights. The kind of place where conversations happen that nobody wants on record.
Paolo’s Mercedes is already there.
I park across from him and kill the engine. Sit for a second with my hands on the wheel, running through what I’m going to say. Nothing lands. Nothing ever lands with him because the man can smell bullshit through concrete.
He’s leaning against his car when I walk over. Arms folded. Face unreadable. He looks like he’s been waiting exactly long enough to be annoyed about it.
“You brought her to Vegas.”
Not a question. Not a greeting. Just the fact, laid out flat like a card he’s been holding.
“Anna, her caretaker, broke her hip. Natalia needed to get here fast. It was the right call.”
“The right call.” Paolo’s pauses. “I got you the plane so you could move quickly if you needed to. Instead, you flew the target to the city where her father runs the Bratva and where your own father runs half the casinos on the Strip. And you’re standing here telling me that was the right call.”
When he puts it like that, it sounds about as smart as juggling grenades.
“Nobody saw us.”
“You don’t know that.” He closes the distance between us.
The silence down here is oppressive, just his shoes on concrete and the dull thud of my own pulse.
“I stuck my neck out for you. I told you one week. It’s been two days and instead of more intel or a resolution, you show up back here with her. What am I supposed to do with that?”
“I’m working on it.”
“Working on what, Luca? What is the plan?”
The goddamn plan. I open my mouth and nothing comes out because there is no plan.
There’s just Natalia and the way she looked at Anna in that hospital room and the Colombian alliance I still haven’t fully mapped and the growing, sickening certainty that I’m never going to do what they sent me there to do.
“The Colombian angle is real,” I say. “Full cartel merger. Her marriage is the seal on it. If I can get all the details, that’s worth more to the family than one body.”
“You said that two days ago. Where are the names?”
“I’m close.”
“You’re close,” he repeats. Same tone he used on the beach. The verdict tone. “You were close two days ago. Before that, you were close for three weeks. I’m starting to think ‘close’ means something different to you than it does to me.”
I can’t hold his stare. Look at the pillar behind his shoulder instead, at the raw concrete and the rebar poking through like a broken bone.
“Luca.” His voice drops a register. “I need you to hear me right now. Not as your uncle. As the underboss of this family.”
The title lands like a slap. He never pulls rank with me. Never needs to.
“I have not told Lorenzo that I found you in North Carolina. I have not told him that I think you might be compromised. I have not told him you’re in Vegas right now with the girl.” He lets that hang. “Do you understand what that means?”
I understand. My throat tightens around it.
He continues, gaining steam. “It means if he finds out, not just what you’ve done, but that I knew, it’s not only your neck. It’s mine. And I am willing to carry that weight because you are my nephew. But you’re making it very, very difficult to keep carrying it.”
There it is. The thing that guts me worse than anger. Paolo choosing me over protocol and me giving him nothing to justify the choice.
Paolo carrying weight that should be mine. Paolo stepping in for me again.
It started when I was sixteen and stupid enough to think running with a bunch of degenerates who broke into houses for fun meant I finally belonged somewhere.
Then we picked the wrong house. Blanco’s.
Blew out more than a window that night. Cost the family money, damaged a business relationship my father actually needed, and turned me into the son everybody kept one eye on after that.
The one who needed watching. The one who needed handling.
I told myself this mission would end all of it. One job, done clean, and maybe I stop being the guy somebody else has to explain. Maybe Lorenzo finally looks at me and sees someone worth trusting.
Instead I’m standing in a parking garage, watching the one man who always defended me run out of reasons to keep doing it.
“What do you want me to do?” I run a hand through my hair, frustrated.
“I told you. I want you to give me something I can use. Names. Routes. A timeline. Something that justifies why she’s still breathing and why I’m still lying to my brother.” He pauses. “And then I want you to finish it.”
He holds my eyes long enough for the silence to calcify. Then he turns, gets in the Mercedes, and drives out. The car climbs the ramp and disappears into the white Vegas glare, leaving me alone with the heat, the concrete, and the taste of that conversation still lodged in my throat.
I stand there until I can’t hear the engine anymore. Hands in my pockets. Back teeth clenched so hard they might crack.
Excellent. Everything’s going great.
The hotel room is too quiet.
I’ve been back for an hour. Pacing. Sitting. Pacing again. The curtains are drawn and Vegas hums outside like a machine that doesn’t care about any of this. Natalia’s still at the hospital. Anna’s transfer is probably underway. Everything is probably fine.
Nothing is fine.
My burner phone buzzes in my pocket.
Unknown number.
I blow out a breath and pull it free as I drift toward the bathroom, already over this conversation before it starts.
“Paolo, I get it. You don’t need to—”
“Luca.”
Ice floods my veins. It’s not Paolo. It’s Dario.
“What do you want, Dario?”
“What do I want? I want to know where the hell my brother has been for the last three weeks. I was worried. But fuck me for caring, right?”
“You’re not worried about me,” I shoot back, the old resentment flaring hot and fast. “You’re worried I fucked up. Be honest.”
The problem with Dario has never been that he’s a bad brother. He’s just the one Lorenzo turns to first. The one who walks into a room and doesn’t have to wonder if people are humoring him. The one who never had Blanco hanging off his neck like a sign that says watch this one, he breaks things.
Love you, bro. Hate this dynamic. Deeply.
“Can you blame me?” he finally bites out. “We haven’t heard a thing. Paolo just said you were ‘dealing with it.’ What the hell does that mean, Luca?”
I lean against the marble counter and stare at myself in the mirror. I look like shit. Pale. Tired. Haunted as hell. “It means the situation is complicated.”
“Complicated. Right. You know what’s not complicated? The job. Go there. Do the thing. Come home. That’s three steps. Even you should be able to count that high.”
Even you.
He probably doesn’t even hear himself say it. That’s the thing about Dario, the thing that makes it worse. He’s not trying to twist the knife. He just lives so comfortably in the role of the son who gets trusted that he doesn’t notice when he’s standing on the spot where I’m trying to breathe.
“You want the truth?” I ask.
Dario doesn’t answer.
That should be my cue to shut up.
Instead, I keep going because apparently I’m addicted to making my own life worse.
“The situation changed.”
“How?”
“Natalia changed it.”
Silence.
Then, flatly, “What the fuck does that mean?”
“It means she’s not what we thought.”
“She’s Kozlov’s daughter.”
“Yeah, no shit. I’m familiar.”
“Then act like it.” Dario’s voice shifts. Harder. Closer to the bone. “Remember Santino? Our consigliere? The man the Bratva put in the ground? You told Dad you could make them pay. You begged for this, Luca. You looked him in the eye and said ‘trust me’.”
The mirror gives me back my own face, and I hate every inch of it.
Trust me. I did say that. Standing in Lorenzo’s office with my pulse jacked and my hands behind my back so he wouldn’t see them shaking. I can handle this. Let me prove it. Let me prove I’m not—
I shake my head. “Look, Dario. Kozlov doesn’t give a shit about her. She’s not a player, she’s a pawn. Killing her doesn’t hurt him. It doesn’t avenge Santino. It does nothing.”
“And you know this how? Because you’ve been living with her for a month?”
“Because I’ve been closer to our family’s enemy than anyone in our organization has ever been. I’m learning things we can actually use.”
“Then use them and finish the job.”
“The job was wrong,” I blurt out.
Silence.
I can hear Dario breathing. Can feel him processing what I just said, not as a tactical disagreement but as something much more dangerous.
“Luca.” His voice drops. “Do you hear yourself right now?”
“She didn’t choose her family. She’s not a combatant. She’s got nothing to do with what happened to Santino and she sure as hell doesn’t deserve to die because her last name is Kozlov.”
“Since when do you get to make that call?”
“Since I’m the one standing in front of her.”
“And what happens when Dad finds out? When he realizes his son, the one who begged for this mission, caught feelings for the target instead?”
The word feelings lands like a fist. Not because it’s wrong. Because it isn’t enough.
“You know what the worst part is?” Dario continues. “That I’m even on this call now. Paolo gave me this number, and now I know. So either I tell Dad, or I don’t. And if I don’t, and he finds out later...”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because I have a family, Luca. Paige. The twins. I have people who need me to not be on Lorenzo Andretti’s shit list because my little brother decided to go rogue on the most important operation we’ve ever—”
“I know, Dario.”
My hand is white-knuckled around the phone. Every person who knows is another person standing in the blast radius when Lorenzo finds out, and I put them there because I can’t do the one thing they need me to do.
Can’t. Not won’t. Can’t.
“It doesn’t seem like you know.” His voice is tinged with bitterness. “It seems like you got distracted.”
“It’s not me getting distracted,” I explode.
“It’s not me losing my nerve. It’s not pity, and it’s not confusion, and it’s not a fucking phase.
” My voice drops lower with every word. Meaner.
Truer. “I’m not going to do this just because I was born an Andretti.
And I’m not going to fucking kill Natalia. ”
The silence after that is enormous.
I hear him breathe in.
I hear something else too.
A tiny sound behind me. Soft. Close.
My stomach drops straight through the floor.
My eyes snap to the mirror.
Natalia is standing in the bathroom doorway.
For one stupid, fractured second, my brain tries to rewind the last thirty seconds of my life. Tries to calculate exactly how much she heard, what words were still hanging in the air when she walked in, whether I can still talk my way out of this.
There isn’t.
I know it before I finish turning around. I know it the way you know a car wreck is coming in the half-second before impact—total clarity, zero ability to stop it.
Standing in the doorway, her face is as white as the marble counter. Her phone is clutched in one hand, a dead screen staring up at the ceiling. Her eyes—those crystal blue eyes that have haunted my every waking thought—are wide with a horror so profound it steals the air from my lungs.
“Nat,” I breathe, but the name is a ghost on my lips.
The phone is still in my hand. Dario’s voice, tinny and distant, saying my name.
She takes one step back. Small. Instinctive. Like getting farther away from me is the only thing her body knows to do.
That step hits harder than a fist.
Tears flood her eyes, but it’s the look on her face that guts me. The shock giving way to something worse. The trust draining out of her so fast I can actually see it happen.
And there I am in the middle of it, reflected in the mirror beside me.
Not her boyfriend.
Not the man who kept her safe.
Not the man she let herself fall for.
The man who came to the island to kill her.